


Songs About Fire

by Go0se



Category: Critical Role (Web Series), The Adventure Zone (Podcast)
Genre: Ambiguous/Open Ending, Crack Treated Seriously, Crossing Timelines, Fire Magic, Gen, Mentions of canon-typical violence, One Shot
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-29
Updated: 2019-12-29
Packaged: 2021-02-24 21:41:25
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,734
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22004887
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Go0se/pseuds/Go0se
Summary: Out of all the times Caleb had woken up from a dissociative fog to find himself in a cave surrounded by strangers, this was probably the weirdest.
Comments: 12
Kudos: 126





	Songs About Fire

**Author's Note:**

> I know as much about this as you all do tbh, but I found it buried in my notes in my most recent notes-unburying project, and it's pretty alright, so here! It is yours now, internet.  
> For reference I'm using the Pathfinder version of 'Detect Magic', which is functionally the same except a cantrip.  
> Title is stolen in its entirety from the 1994 Mountain Goats EP of the same name.  
> ~

The smell of smoke and burning skin had consumed the cave and enveloped Caleb’s head right as he’d been knocked prone. For the next indeterminable amount of time all he could do was try to focus on the feeling of his bitten-sharp nails against his own face instead of the screaming and yowling from decades before. His breath rushed out of him and then back into his lungs again, ragged, uneven.  
Eventually the undead thing ceased its thrashing, and the fire died down.

Caleb’s world swam back into view as his lungs eased in their panic. With a slightly shaky hand, he pushed himself up so he was at least half-sitting on the cold, compacted earth, instead of laying on it.

He snapped his fingers. Frumpkin immediately appeared on his shoulders, winding tightly around him in the fae cat’s scarf mode. His soft fur covered Caleb’s ears, reassuringly weighty and safe and familiar (ha, ha). The pressure and warmth helped Caleb to breathe a little easier.

Footsteps.

Before he’d even had a chance to tense, much less prepare even a fire bolt, someone had walked right up to him and pulled him by the arm to his feet. “Hey, sorry about that, kemosabe,” the someone said, overly cheerful to Caleb’s ears. “That did a bit of a number on you, didn’t it? You alright?” A moment of tutting. “You don’t _look_ too singed.”  
Caleb squinted through the darkness, heart thudding in his throat. He swallowed, then tried asking into the black, “Who are you?” His voice sounded hoarse and weak, but no worse than usual after one of his... fade-outs. Alright. He put up his hands in the supposedly universally-recognized gesture of surrender, hiding a small copper wire tightly in between his fingers. The press of the comparitively cold metal wound close to his skin was a grounding point. Caleb kept his breathing as even as he could.

“Ms. Lup, I think he might be in shock,” someone else said, from beside the first voice. Caleb startled, but only just. “I can’t quite see him right now, to tell for sure, but it’d make sense with how he fell when your fireballs hit that thing.”  
“Right!” A dull thwack, like someone had hit themself in the face. What the hell. “I forget not everybody has darkvision sometimes. Major egg on my face. Angus, pumpkin, would you mind?”  
The second’s voice perked up. “Of course!” A small popping noise followed.

Light flooded their section of the cave. Caleb flinched instinctively, raising his arms to cover his face as sparks burst in his vision. When the flare faded he set his hands down, blinking hard.

Standing in front of him was a human boy and a young—relatively, Caleb supposed—elven woman, both of who were looking at Caleb curiously. He stared back.

The elven woman was tall, with dark blue skin (but not so dark as a drow’s) and at least seven piercings in her long ears. She’d tied her hair into an elaborate bun at the top of her head, and was dressed in a black robe that fell past her feet, tied at her bust with a thin silver belt. Another matching silver belt at her waist held a number of loops, one which was holding a component pouch, and one of which was apparently a holster. She smiled at Caleb, and spun the black umbrella she was carrying in one hand like Jester would sometimes spin the Wand Of Smiles to show off; dramatically blowing along the top of it for some reason, then reholstering at her waist.  
In her other hand she carried a wickedly sharp scythe, nearly as tall as herself and black as a night without moons.

Even as the threat registered in Caleb’s brain, the visuals _tick-tick-ticked_ into slot’s in his infallible memory, and his eyes flicked to the second person. The boy beside her was skinny and tall, only slightly shorter than Caleb; his dark brown skin looked almost gold in the torch-like Light spell, which cast similar shadows on his tightly curled black hair. He wore thin rectangular glasses and the well-maintained clothing of a student. In his hand was a wand that—Caleb blinked—had a small star set onto the end of it. The star glowed fiercely. Its impression stuck to the inside of Caleb’s eyelids and stung. “Please introduce yourself, sir,” the boy said formally; a hint of warning in his tone. He raised the wand slightly to emphasize the point.

Caleb kept staring, now more than a little disconcerted. Was this a joke?

He understood very well that boys as young as the one before him-- who was, what, fourteen at the most?-- could cause a lot of harm to a person; Gods knew he himself was proof of that. But the teenager spoke like someone who hadn’t ever intentionally hurt another person; at the very least, he had never killed anybody. And he was trying to _threaten_ Caleb?  
The elf woman, though, was another matter entirely. Watching her out of the corner of his eye, he decided no, whatever the fuck was going on here probably wasn’t a joke. He nodded at the kid, swallowing. Concentrating on the wire in his hand. He just needed their gazes off him for a second, and if Nott was anywhere near him, she’d get his Message and come get him out of here. “Phillipe,” he told them, “Phillipe Brandt.”

The elven woman snorted, leaning on her scythe like it was nothing more than a walking stick. “Oh no, that dog’s not gonna go hunt, dear heart. Don’t get me wrong, you’ve got a pretty good lying face and all, but I have _hella_ insight bonus. Try again. With your real name that isn’t fake, this time.” She settled backwards into her stance, her free hand now casually near her wand again.

“Please,” the boy added firmly.

Before Caleb could speak again, another voice pealed from the dark behind them. “Hey, um, if we could stop with this… interrogation? For a sec?” The voice was higher-pitched and a little scratchy, but not unpleasantly. “I have a pretty important question to ask that I’d like to get to before any blasty stuff happens.”

Caleb and the two strangers turned at the same time.

Picking her way carefully towards them, over the various large rocks scattered across the floor of the cave, was a young human woman in very strange clothes. Her skin was a slightly darker brown than the boy behind Caleb; the contrast highlighted her eye-wateringly red and orange hair, shaved on the sides to only an inch or so of curls and grown into a floppy sort of puff pompadour on the top of her head. Her lips were bright red too, although she had soot and dirt smeared on her nose and one side of her cheek. She wore dark pants and a red-checkered shirt, and a vest over it. Her vest was covered with pins, the largest of which was a circle of three pink, purple and blue stripes in a row. Spidered all over the vest was bright, thin red thread, which crisscrossed the fabric like a map and made it almost obnoxiously loud to see even in the dark cave.  
In her arms she carried an albino rabbit the size of a small dog.

“What,” Caleb said finally, moving his hands down, surreptitiously tracing a rune in the air as he did. His cantrip radiated out in a cone from his fingers; he felt Frumpkin’s fur start to bristle as the magic carried through him.

The young woman was practically singing with magic. Not only her jacket, which he’d expected, but herself as a whole, so much so he was almost taken aback. A sorcerer? He hadn’t met a lot of human sorcerers, and even the ones he had didn’t give off magic like this.  
He was a little surprised that the rabbit who he’d assumed was her familiar hadn’t given off any magical signature at all, but then, maybe it was her animal companion instead. Or just a pet. His thoughts flashed briefly to Nugget and the departed Professor Thaddeus.  
The rabbit had an orange ribbon tied in a loose bow around its neck. _Nugget especially,_ Caleb though.

“Well, hi there,” the elf said into the silence. “What’s your name, hon?”

The young woman jumped down from the last rock, sending a bunch of pebbles scattering into the dark as she landed, and stood up. “I’m, uh, Aubrey?” She said, clearly intending it as a declaration, but her voice cracked slightly anyway. “Aubrey Little. And the Lady Flame is my stage name.”

“Who’s, ah, your friend there?” Caleb spoke up, gesturing to the rabbit. As he spoke he casually flung another detect magic spell, in case he'd missed something; it swept outwards and rippled across them both, but told him the same.

Aubrey Little readjusted the rabbit in her arms so it’d be more comfortable. “He's my faithful compatriot, Doctor Harris Bonkers,” she said proudly. Dr. Harris Bonkers twitched his ears. “PhD,” she added.

“… I see.” Caleb wasn't sure what he’d been expecting.

He turned on his heel so that he, Aubrey Little, and the strange pair he’d met first were facing each other in a loose circle.

“Lady Flame and a Doctor, huh? Well, hail and well-met!" The elven woman said. Her smile had grown when she’d asked who Aubrey was, and only did more now. It seemed less frightening now. "I like your look, by the way, really eye-catching.”

“Thank you,” Aubrey said, cracking a smile of her own. “I’d hoped it’d be flamboyant."

"Sure was. So, I’m Lup-- you might know my brother from TV and my whole crew from the whole, you know, multi-verse echoing song visions a while ago. And this here is Angus McDonald, the world’s greatest detective and nearly youngest professor of magic."

“Two more months,” Angus said proudly. He looked to Lup for some kind of signal, then lowered his wand with its incongruous star on the end. (Though, Caleb supposed, one of his friends carried around a pink haversack pocket dimension. Maybe he shouldn’t be so quick to judge.)

“Well-met,” Aubrey agreed. “So. Ahem.”

“Right, right, your question. What was up, sweet stuff?”

Aubrey’s cheeks darkened slightly at the nickname, but she cleared her throat again. “Thanks. So my question was, uh, actually a few, I think. I actually had more but I figured out while walking that this was all actually real, isn’t it. And that thing back there _was_ an actual zombie.”

“It definitely is, Ms. Aubrey,” Angus agreed.

“Alright, well, I’ll process that later I guess. So, new questions. One—where are we? Two, how’d we get here? And three, if you’ll excuse me, I know I just met you all and everything—what the _fuuuu_ _uck?_ ” She carried out the word, her voice rising in pitch.

Lup apparently found that hilarious. She burst out laughing for a long moment before she could answer. "All good questions!” She said cheerfully, still wheezing and wiping her eyes. “Oh, gods.”

“Pretty big matzoh balls,” Caleb agreed. He was beginning to relax, but only the barest amount.

"But so, um, the place we’re in?”

“Yeah, absolutely. That's the thing, y’all-- I really have no clue.” Lup frowned, and it settled so naturally onto her face Caleb realized with a start that he’d been underestimating her. This woman was very powerful, that much was clear already. “Usually I could do something really cool to tell us exactly where we are, which continent and plane and all that, and to be honest your girl would’ve done that already because caves like this are not super my jam. Spent too long in one once. But,” she breathed in and out deliberately, like keeping calm. “I can’t do my super cool cutting reality trick just now, for some reason. Something’s blocking my connection with my mama bird--”

“Your Lady,” Angus corrected.

“-- my Lady mama bird, yeah-- something’s cutting that off here. And the last time that happened, I wasn’t really in a place to notice, but according to my dumbass brother-in-law, it meant some pretty bad shit.” She was quiet for a moment, before a small smile returned to her face. “Don’t worry, though. I can reaper good enough to tell you that there’s nothing _wrong_ with our friends upstairs there-- that was a whole fucking other episode-- so that means that something down _here_ is throwing up some fantasy radio interference.” Lup’s smile slipped off her face and her expression settled into something more serious.  
Her pointed ears, which had been perked up brightly the whole time, lowered slightly back towards her head.

  
Caleb’s brain decided to throw most of that out and concentrate on one detail: something was blocking divine magic here. If he focused he could feel it too, like a strange pressure on his temples when he moved. His own magic was not affected by a divine field. But if they ran into an arcane block somewhere down here, he’d be in trouble.

After a moment, he spoke up as well. "As for how we got here, I do not know." He turned the wire over in his fingers, a nervous habit, but no longer planning to use it. Sending a message out and not receiving one back was bad luck. A silly superstition, he knew, but one that'd stuck with him ever since Nott had taught him the cantrip; and now that he knew divine magic was blocked here, wherever _here_ was, worry crept in that she'd be too far away to hear him. That, more than the claustrophobia of the cave, started to tighten his throat.  
"The last thing I remember was some kind of earthquake, had woken me and my friends--" _Please,_ he thought, not knowing to who, _please let them be alright._ "-- and we were preparing for a fight. Then I was here. I couldn't think very well with... that." He gestured to the various zombie corpses strewn everywhere.

Aubrey winced, nodding. "Yeah. Bom-boms can be pretty freaky, huh."

"They sure can," Lup agreed, with all confidence. (Though, something about the twitch of her ears reminded Caleb of Caduceus when he was agreeing with a statement he didn't fully understand.)

“So…” Aubrey shifted, resettling Doctor Harris Bonkers in her arms. “So, what does _that_ mean we should do, exactly?”

In answer, Caleb stretched out his hand and muttered under his breath, and four globules of pale purple light shot out, spreading into an approximately equidistant circle around them, out beyond the reach of the boy-- Angus’-- Light spell.  
“Nice showmanship, cat boy,” Lup said.  
Caleb decided to ignore that for now. “We’ll need to go up against whatever is causing this… interference, and deal with it,” he said to Aubrey. “At the very least we’ll figure out what to do after that.”

“You up for that, pumpkin?” Lup asked Angus.

Angus nodded determinedly. “A good detective always gets to the bottom of a case,” he said.

Caleb smiled for a moment, thinking of Jester and Nott.

“Man,” Aubrey said after a moment, looking between the three of them. “Duck and Ned are going to be _pissed_ they missed this part."

Lup laughed. "Oh, I know. My hubby's gonna be so jealous, too."  
She drew her wand again, waving her scythe; it un-summoned, vanishing into smoke with the movement of her hand, leaving only a long curved dagger which she tucked into the belt at her waist. Her long robe dissapted as well, turning into a sensible tunic shirt, pants and boots combinaion that Caleb had seen on many adventurers. The only thing remarkable about her outfit now was a short jacket which fell just to her waist, laden with glossy black feathers that didn’t so much catch the light as eat it. That was… an alarming sign.

  
No one else needed to make any preparations or last minute outfit changes. Angus stepped up closer to Ms. Lup, and kept his wand raised defensively as they all turned in the same direction, towards where the undead thing had lay burning only minutes ago. All that remained was a charred corpse. Caleb forced the unease back into his stomach.

Lup’s airy voice, now listing towards serious, echoed through the cave. “Alright gang. Time to start us an adventure.”

_-_


End file.
